Wholeness and Virtual Communities

“The Jewel Net of Indra…Imagine a vast net: at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels. In the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight in every other jewel.”

This one may seem contradictory to the item I logged a couple days ago, about portable power. The whole thrust of solar energy true believers is to “get off the grid”. But in my view, you are just hooking into the much, much larger solar grid. The fact that this project is underwritten by software entrepreneur Bill Gross’s Idealab incubator, applying an Internet model of business development, underscores a convergence of interests around interconnection.

“Our solar energy systems empower environmentally conscious customers to achieve utility independence and save money on energy. Our expertise in engineering, capital financing, construction management, and customer service is the reason many of California’s forward-thinking companies have chosen to rely on EI Solutions.”

A major academic institution has an ongoing project to compile the empirical evidence for a rising global consciousness. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

“Personal experience is supported by a growing number of good experiments which show that consciousness and intention have subtle but important effects in the world. We know that groups of people sometimes experience a special resonance of feelings and ideas, and recent scientific evidence indicates that effects of coherent group consciousness can be detected with appropriate instruments. The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international collaboration of researchers extending this research to global dimensions via the Internet. The project uses technology and methods designed to record effects of events that stimulate us to integrate as a world-wide consciousness. Examples include the funeral ceremonies of Princess Diana, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, and a few minutes around midnight on any New Years Eve.”

“The Global Consciousness Project is an ongoing, long-term experiment, and the results from the instances that have been analyzed thus far show considerable evidence of a correlation between particular events and the data from our network of random event generators. A summary for nearly four years (to May, 2002) shows a highly significant result. It is tempting to draw the conclusion that a true global consciousness is creating the anomalous effects.”

I wasn’t sure where to classify this news item – World Right Now, Network Infrastructure? But perhaps a stitching together of the world’s knowledge by this technology is more about wholeness.

“As part of its effort to make offline information searchable online, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them in Google.”

Environmental activists have always been driven by visions of wholeness. A new flavor of activity called neurogreens seems to more consciously fuse vision with tactics.

Aware of living in the cataclysmatic 21st century, neurogreens want to bring to life an ecoactivist identity which is to be egalitarian

against social precarity and libertarian against digital monopoly, and is to feed upon the experiences and practices of the

Seattle-Genoa-Mumbai movement. Neurogreens look at and absorb latest developments in environmental science, neuroscience, social science, media technology, in order to be able to fight back resolutely and effectively against global war and environmental destruction, both for our sake and our children and grandchildren’s.

Teilhard’s vision of a “thinking layer” of interconnected minds is one in a long line of visions of unity and wholeness. Most religions and spiritual paths seek this unity; unity in God, or unity as God. Contemplation of wholeness as reflected in or demonstrated by technology may seem counter-intuitive at first. This section seeks to provide pointers to telecommunications and information technology, including the Internet, as means to a spiritual end.